Category: Polemics & Exchanges

State Considering his kind assessment of my work (“Force and Idea,” February), which is matched by my judgments of his, it may seem ungenerous to criticize Sam Francis’s treatment of my comments on ideology in After Liberalism. I bring up our difference of opinion only for purposes of clarification. In most of our views about...

David Hartman’s comments about the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests are on the mark (Cultural Revolutions, February). It is a widespread practice for Texas teachers to “teach the TAAS.” Depriving students of a broad-based liberal arts education has never been so common. History classes are being downgraded to “social studies” status so that...

Reading Chronicles has provided me, in equal parts, education, philosophic inspiration, and new words to add to my vocabulary—until now. Justin Raimondo’s review (“The British Were Coming!” December 1998) of Thomas Mahl’s Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44 is one of the best examples of misinformation, damning indictments unsupported by facts,...

No sooner were my spirits raised by reading your quotation from the Oxford English Dictionary on the meaning of to parse than they were dashed by this sentence in the New York Times: “‘It’s not just, “Can you parse this sentence in the subjunctive?'” said Mrs. Cipolone, who had 36 Latin students when she began...

Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...

During Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to Bulgaria (Cultural Revolutions, December), the Washington Times featured a front-page photo of the First Lady surrounded by several Bulgarian orphans, over the caption, “Aiding Orphans.” I sincerely hope that Mrs. Clinton showed more compassion toward these Bulgarian orphans than she did during her 1996 visit with their Rumanian counterparts....

Your October 1998 issue struck a particularly agreeable note. I am 62, and the society that I knew as a child and young man has been so corrupted that, when I describe that former time to young people, they believe I am indulging some sort of fantasy. Still, the question posed by Thomas Fleming (“Mob...

Douglas Wilson’s article, “Why Evangelical Colleges Aren’t,” (Vital Signs, September) is provocative but unsubstantiated. It is also quietly self-serving, failing to mention his role as a founder of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. His assertions about evangelical higher education ought to be measured against the facts of those colleges and against his own...

Lew Rockwell (“Flies in the Ointment,” September) and I have the same ultimate objective: “an educational market in which parents are responsible for paying for their own children’s education.” We agree also on the “twin evils of public education: involuntary funding and compulsory attendance.” In our ideal (libertarian) world, government would play no role in...

Ralph Reiland (“Cultural Revolutions,” August) find himself in the same camp as the AIDS activists in insisting that political philosophy dictate physiology. The AIDS activists say “AIDS is everyone’s disease” because they can’t stand the idea of a virus disproportionately affecting them. Reiland pooh-poohs mountains of evidence of obesity’s harmfulness (heavily documented in my book...

Many of us eat without giving a thought to the miserable lives and violent, bloody deaths of the animals on our plates. Christians have a choice. We can add to the level of violence, suffering, and death in the world, or we can attempt to withdraw our support for violence and bloodshed wherever and whenever...

Kudos to Chronicles for “Sovereignty for Sale? The Free Trade Debate” (July) and high praise to Brother Pat for “Toward One Nation, Indivisible“! One thing, though: the Buchananite fair trade “Long March Back” will only come via the third-party route. The Republicans are but the Fabian wing of the Socialist Party, the Democrats being the...

A generation ago, utopianism was mainly a leftist mental habit. In the past decade, the right has adopted the Utopian frame of mind, not a surprise for groups out of power for so long. By utopianism, I mean Patrick Buchanan’s lament in Chronicles (“Toward One Nation, Indivisible,” July), a rather one-sided analysis (among excellent observations),...

There must be some mistake. After finishing Bob Djurdjevic’s “Wiping Out the Middle Class” (May), I suspect someone has sneaked the latest issue of Mother Jones inside a Chronicles cover. Such hand-wringing over an alarmist report on “income inequality” released by a liberal Washington think tank whose mission is to lobby for more redistribution of...

I have a few thoughts on Sam Francis’s critique of Thomas Chittum’s Civil War II (“Prophesying War,” June). Dr. Francis’s major criticism of Chittum’s ghastly scenario is that the power elite will not let it happen, but rather will lead America down the path to Brazilianization. I think he overestimates the power of establishment propaganda...

Theodore Pappas’s depressing tale (“The Life and Times of the King Plagiarism Story,” May) of having his Plagiarism and the Culture War rejected by some 40 publishers only begins to reveal the sorry state of today’s highly selective “information explosion.” Even all the other doleful Chronicles articles recounting the horrors of publishing constitute a mere...

Chronicles‘ May issue (“Who Killed the Book?“) leaves open the question of how scholars publish their books now that the university presses have abandoned all pretense of serving the academic community. Short-run scholarly monographs —300-700 hundred copies—are the primary medium of scholarly communication at that level of technical mastery and expert knowledge required for serious...

As an environmentalist with four decades of observation and experience with The Cause, I would like to respond to Chilton Williamson’s May column (“What Do Environmentalists Want?“). I think most citizens (and environmentalists) want a safe, clean, long-lasting, biologically diverse, and desirable place to live. Even, eventually, a population more in balance with what our...

Kenneth McDonald’s article (“The French Revolution in Canada,” April) illustrates why Quebec may secede from Canada. The legal mechanisms have been explained, but the political dynamics need to be understood. First, McDonald complains that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (in Sections 16-22 of the Constitution Act of 1982) has entrenched French and English...

Well, thank Heavens! Someone has finally labeled Casablanca what it has always been: puerile war propaganda (“Restless Natives,” March). I wish I could say that I recognized this film for what it was when I was a young schoolboy in the 1940’s. Then, I endlessly pestered my parents to “sign” so I could run off...

The novelty of 20th-century historiography does not reside in new theories (the last century was too rich in this respect), but in the veto exercised over its main issues. One such, the issue of communism, has been half-opened by Francois Furet and Stephen Courtois; the other, the issue of Hitlerism, is still under the interdict...

In “The Crime of History” (March), Tomislav Sunic was correct that in both the East and the West the vilification of Nazism far exceeded any criticism of communism. This is evident even in our national politics, where the most damning invective that can be used against an opponent is to accuse him of being another...

Patrick Walsh’s letter to the editor in the April issue of Chronicles resurrects a long-discredited lie about the “left-wing Marxist” IRA. For 15 years, that smear kept many Americans, including me, from supporting democracy for the occupied Irish. Then, on July 5, 1987, the London Observer reported that the lie had been fabricated in the...

Since I had emerged from the theater in Foley, Alabama, somewhat sickened after watching Sling Blade, imagine my surprise when I found Clyde Wilson endorsing the film in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, November 1997). Because I’ve met Dr. Wilson and respect him greatly, I figured I must have been a shallow rube the first time I...

Dr. Samuel Francis seems to think that those of us who hope to reform the American empire by devolution are suffering from an “infantile disorder” and pursuing a goal neither possible or desirable (Principalities & Powers, February). Then he turns around and admits that nothing else has worked. His only hope seems to be a...

As America’s foremost bugbear of neoconservatives, it is difficult to understand why Chronicles assigned William F. Buckley’s religious autobiography to Chilton Williamson, Jr. (“E’en Though It Be a Cross,” January), a longtime associate of Buckley during his employment at National Review. The pretensions of Buckley’s book, Nearer, My God, require the critical observation of someone...

Michael Hill’s January article, “Celtic Justice,” is an interesting historical piece for anyone studying pagan Celtic culture. But he seems to believe that some form of Celtic-Irish law and tradition still exists today. This is pure fantasy. There is no Celtic world left. There is no surviving system of Celtic justice. Such a world exists...

One phrase leaps out of Paul Gottfried’s review of Walter McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State (January), and that is the strange idea than an American empire encompassing Latin America, the Philippines, and points beyond arose “without much popular opposition.” Contrary to McDougall and Gottfried, the anti-interventionist tradition started with the Founders of this nation, who...

Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...

In an otherwise cogent and incisive article (“The Last Respectable Bias,” December), William A. Donohue somehow manages to dance all around, but never quite name, the one faction in our society that would go a long way toward answering his rhetorical question, “Why the cheap shots against Catholicism?” That faction, of course, is the militant...

Pat Buchanan’s October article (“Mr. Lincoln’s War“) allows us to glimpse the concern, the love, and the care of those Americans savaged by the Civil War. Mr. Buchanan provided important insights into Abraham Lincoln’s different political stances before, during, and after the Civil War. The revisionist history that has been foisted upon our land is...

James Hitchcock, in his review of my Heart of the World, Center of the Church (“City of Man, City of God,” September), argues that the book is “the summing up of a controversy over a . . . specifically Catholic . . . view of politics” which pits me against certain neoconservative Catholics and, behind...

In his September correspondence (“Letter from Nueva York: The Elite of El-Bronx“), Robert Berman rightly focuses on the separatist aspect of “bilingual” education as practiced at Hostos Community College and elsewhere in the United States. This pernicious pedagogy is well on its way to creating an unbridgeable, permanent gap between Hispanics and the larger American...

For many years I have read Professor Neusner’s polemics with profit and delight. I have marveled at his skill in combining an arcane discipline with provocative rhetoric. Despite this respect, I nonetheless find myself disagreeing with Neusner’s November essay (“Jews Without Judaism“) about “irreligious” Jews. For one thing, it is problematic to treat Jews like...

To Marian Kester Coombs’ article (“Dumb and Number,” October) on the dumbing-down of math standards, I say, “Hear, hear.” In fact, the complaint about the downgrading of mathematical knowledge is gathering strength among mathematicians as well as the public. I hear anecdotes all the time of a freshman who, asked to divide 387 by ten,...

The arguments by Srdja Trifkovic against the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO (Cultural Revolutions, August) are reminiscent of my variation of an old Noel Coward ditty: “Don’t let’s be beastly to the Russians / For you can’t deprive a gangster of his gun. / Though they’ve been a little nasty...

Chronicles is my favorite magazine, a fact I register by resubscribing every year and occasionally donating a few bucks to its fund drives, so I feel no guilt that my first comments to its editors are harsh. “Don’t Feed the War Machine” by Bill Kauffman (August) is nothing but babble. Mr. Kauffman is sliding fast...

Steven Greenhut is as careless with facts in his August “Letter From Lima: HUD Strikes Again” as he is in his colorful editorials about us in the Lima News. Nearly one-fourth of Lima’s population lives in poverty, and over 2,000 people have been on our waiting list for more than two years. So how could...

I, like many scholars, stand in awe of the accomplishments of Jacob Neusner, but his August “Letter From Inner Israel: Continental Judaisms, R.I.P.” seems unusually insensitive and bizarre. Neusner accuses continental European Judaism, in the aftermath of Nazi and Soviet barbarism, of insularity, suspicion, lack of learning, and lack of faith. I should have thought...

Although Katherine Dalton’s comments about the Kelly Flinn case (Cultural Revolutions, August) are well-taken, they do not quite find the bulls-eye on why the Uniform Code of Military Justice outlaws adultery. Adultery reveals an egregious lack of integrity, by far—at least in the opinion of this former commander of Marines—the most important moral virtue for...

It’s a pity that Chronicles chose a shallow and vindictive reviewer like Justin Raimondo (“David Horowitz and the Ex-Communist Confessional,” June) to vet Radical Son for the Chronicles audience. Justin’s animus toward me (based on a public clash we had some years ago) is transparent enough, but his reading of my text is so bizarre...

While I was grateful for the length and detail of Samuel Francis’s review (“At the Heart of Darkness,” May) of my biography of Lovecraft and my edition of Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Writings, there are some serious errors and misconceptions in the review that require correction. First, it’s peculiar that Mr. Francis begins his review asserting that...

Mr. Mawyer’s article in the April issue (“The Future of the Christian Right“) is absolutely correct in its analysis of the ills of the Republican Party. The congressional elections were one more indicator of the bedrock traditional values of most American voters. Nevertheless, the GOP leadership proved itself to be strongly though underhandedly liberal in...

While working up to his conclusion that “the first task of a moral human being is not to play the stranger to our friends and judge the world as if we were gods,” Thomas Fleming (“Other People,” March) finds it necessary to issue this stirring proclamation: “It is time for Anglo-Americans, in Canada and the...

In just a few years, Samuel Francis has graduated from columnist to philosopher of history who observes past and present and draws the correct conclusions from both. His article in the June issue (“The Price of Empire“) offers a balanced panorama, a nice surprise in the avalanche of talk about “democracy in Zaire” and “Western...

I would like to thank Nicholas Stix for his March Correspondence (“Letter From New York City: The War on White Teachers”). I taught foreign language in a public high school until about five years ago. We had an incident in which a custodian, who was also part of the administration friendship circle, physically threatened one...

As the British captain said to the Italian major who had captured him during the Abyssinian campaign, “No one likes war, but you chaps don’t even make the effort.” After reading the June issue of Chronicles (“Manifest Disaster“), I get the feeling that not only do you chaps not like the U.S.A., you don’t even...

I would like to respond to Professor Clyde Wilson’s editorial (Cultural Revolutions) in your March issue, regarding our efforts toward compromise on the Confederate battle flag that flies above our Statehouse. First and foremost, I respect and share the professor’s view that the battle flag of the Confederacy is a cherished emblem for many Southerners...

While there is much to praise in Michael Hill’s “The South and the New Reconstruction” (March 1997), there is a streak of unreality and wishfulness in the article which begs attention. For example, what would the Southern League have us do with the masses of Northerners—a/k/a Yankees—who inhabit the region? Or, for another twist, what...

In Bill Kauffman’s sermon “World Citizens on Main Street” (March 1997), he decries the purchase of a local Batavia, New York, tractor factory by a German firm as an example of foreign “Teutonic overlords . . . tied to Batavia only by the flimsy cord of the almighty dollar.” Using such epithets as “executioners” and...